Poisoned Pen Press
Published June 24, 2025giv
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
In some ways, Estella (who prefers to go by her first initial, E) is ahead of her time. The United States has just entered World War II and she has taken a job as a research assistant at the local college after earning a doctorate at Yale, a rare accomplishment for a woman, teaching courses after all but the oldest faculty have left to enlist. But in other ways she’s old-fashioned: Her dissertation was on the Gothic novels she loves, and the home she has returned to is a dilapidated mansion on the cliffs above the Hudson river, a brooding pile of stone built below an even more grandiose ruin. While it’s a setting that fits her old-school romantic streak, it’s also a burden. She had to rush home from Boston, summoned by their long-term housekeeper, to discover her father had suffered a massive stroke and her mother is missing. So is the fortune her luxury-loving parents had spent so lavishly. Then the dean of the college, shortly after meeting with her to turn down her request for a proper office, falls to his death – an apparent if inexplicable suicide.
E has a lot on her plate. She’s desperate to find her mother, who the authorities believe may have thrown herself off the cliff, though when they dredge the river the body they find is that of a young college student who had gone missing years earlier. Her intimidating father, who once dominated her home and the college where he was an academic star, had kept trying to tell her something, but was too affected by his stroke to make sense before he died. She doesn’t earn enough to buy adequate groceries for herself and her housekeeper, who did more to raise her than her distant parents. When she tries to sell the artwork her father collected, she’s told it’s virtually worthless, though his personal library – the one she was not allowed to touch – may raise some cash.
Her friends Leontine, a Black librarian whose mother designed beautiful dresses for her missing mother, and Marjorie, the dean’s secretary, keep her going. And then there’s that handsome young professor who has just joined the faculty. Or is he not to be trusted, like the strangely watchful but secretive men who have come to work at the college? And who is it watching her house at night from a boat on the river and leaving footprints in the garden?
Like E, Mary Anna Evans has combined a love of old-fashioned Gothic tropes with feminist sensibilities. The heroine fights to free herself from the legacy of a cruel, overbearing father and argues for her right to earn the same salary as men doing the same job. She rejects the offer of her parents’ lawyer to provide security in a marriage of convenience even though it’s a struggle to keep food on the table. There’s a madwoman in the attic, but she’s confined elsewhere and she’s not mad.
We’re treated to fraught family secrets and a dramatic storm that could come straight out of Brontë or Poe, but it comes with a resolution – thanks to clues found in her father’s library – that reflects both domestic political divisions of 1942, largely overlooked today, and the conflicts of our present moment. It’s an original celebration of the Gothic tradition, replete with a brave heroine, dark secrets, and brooding landscapes.